(from readings in Curd & Cover, Philosophy of Science)

Ruse:

A discipline is more pseudoscientific the more of the following
characteristics it has (pp. 39-40):

doesn't appeal to laws as universal and unchanging (and
exceptionless)

doesn't attempt to provide explanations and predictions

is not testable (i.e. verifiable or falsifiable)

is not tentative

practitioners do not exhibit "integrity"

Creation Science does not do well on any of these counts,
according to Ruse. (In following discussion, the paragraph immediately after
the number is my quick summary of one of Ruse's points. Succeeding
paragraphs are my own comments, with occasional reference to Laudan's
critique.

Laws. "creation science" appeals to miraculous
events, events which violate the laws that currently govern the universe.

First, a quibble which may not affect Ruse's main point. It's not so
clear that science must treat laws as "universal and unchanging." For
example, in the last several years there have been serious discussions
in physics about the possibility that the speed of light may be slower
now than it was at the beginning of the universe. Some empirical
evidence for this claim has been offered. The claim may or may not turn
out to be true, but no one seems to think it's unscientific to even
raise the issue! [Perhaps Ruse could argue that a change in a
fundamental constant doesn't count as a change in the laws of nature?
But that seems implausible, I think; if the value of c changes, then so
does the meaning of a law like E = mc2.)

Second, is it so clear that there could not be scientific evidence for a
violation of natural law? I think there could (but this is
controversial). Suppose I tell you that I can violate the law
of gravity any time I please by hovering a foot off the ground. Your
immediate response is that I'm crazy, but then I perform several
demonstrations, under any conditions you please. Now you'll start
looking around for scientific explanations of my feat -- electromagnets,
hidden wires, giant fans under the floor . . . but none of these things
turns out to be present. At some point wouldn't it be reasonable to
conclude that I can violate the law of gravity? And in fact wouldn't it
even be reasonable to say that you have scientific evidence that I can
do this?

In the previous two paragraphs, I've suggested that
science does not necessarily need to be committed to unchanging or
exceptionless laws. (Paragraph one addressed the "unchanging" part;
paragraph two addressed the "exceptionless" part.) I do think that many
people would agree with Ruse's view here. But there can be good reasons
for changing our views of what science requires. Consider this analogy: At one time it was a standard
view (explicitly defended e.g. by Kant) that science must presuppose a
deterministic worldview: even if we couldn't find a cause, we had to
assume that there was one. This now seems to have been a mistake: not
only can physics admit that some events don't have deterministic causes,
but it even seems that we can establish that some events are not
deterministically caused (e.g. decay of radioactive atoms). This does
not show that scientific laws are violated; instead, it shows that they
are probabilistic (or "incomplete" in the sense that initial conditions
plus the laws of nature don't completely determine an outcome).
But it does show that a characteristic we formerly thought was a
necessary condition for being scientific wasn't necessary after all. In
Kant's day it was thought that scientific laws had to be unchanging,
exceptionless, and deterministic. We have completely abandoned
the requirement of determinism as a result of advances in science
itself. Perhaps we should also give up on the requirements of being
unchanging and exceptionless.

Explanation and Prediction. Ruse suggests that
creation science neither explains nor predicts anything. For example, he
suggests that evolutionary theory has an explanation of the similarity of
the bones in the forelimbs of various species (namely that the species
descend from a common ancestor), while creation science has no
explanation.

Is it right that creation science offers no explanation? One explanation
creation scientists have offered for similarities among organisms is that this is just what one
would expect in creatures with the same designer. (Similarly, you might
expect to find similarities in the music of a single composer, and in some
cases also variations on a single theme.)

(In a way the best examples of phenomena that creationists have a
difficult time explaining are examples that seem to be poor engineering
solutions to a particular problem: Gould on the panda's thumb, which
apparently is a poor device for stripping the bark from bamboo shoots, and
thus would seem unlikely on the hypothesis that the panda was designed by
an all-knowing and all-powerful creator, but makes perfect sense if
evolutionary theory is true, since it is simply an adaptation of an
existing feature to a new use, which is "easier" than introducing a new
feature from scratch.)

Ruse may have a better case with regard to his claim that creation
science doesn't make predictions. It does seem able to make some rather
vague predictions: for example, that organisms will generally be
well-suited to their environments. But it doesn't offer much in the way
of specific predictions. But is prediction really a necessary condition
for being scientific? It's not clear that we get much in the way of
specific predictions from evolutionary theory either.

Testability. Scientific theories should be
testable. Ruse seems to have several distinct criticisms of creation
science on this front: (1) Creationists don't make empirical claims, just
criticize them, so there's nothing to test; (2) creationists don't
actually do any testing of their own claims, just criticism of
evolutionists' claims; (3) when confronted with evidence that conflicts
with their views, creationists hang onto the views anyway, perhaps
introducing some ad hoc hypotheses.

All three claims seem somewhat questionable. (1) As Laudan points out,
creationists do make at least some testable claims, e.g. that the earth is
only a few thousand years old, that humans and other animals appeared on
earth at the same time, etc. (see Laudan p. 49). As Laudan puts it, "these
claims are testable, they have been tested, and they have failed these
tests."

(2) Attempting to find evidence that conflicts with evolution is a kind of
testing, isn't it? True, it's testing evolutionary theory, not creationism
itself, but couldn't there be a community of genuine scientists who were
devoted entirely to criticizing some existing theory? Suppose there were
a group of scientists who devoted their entire careers to attempting to
refute quantum mechanics. Would there be any reason to deny that they
were scientists just because they didn't have a well-tested positive
theory to replace QM with?

[Also: the main reason for "intelligent design" theory seems to be the
desire to find a positive way to test the claim that the universe was
designed by an intelligent being. Intelligent design theorists claim
that they do have positive evidence of intelligent design.]

(3) If Kuhn is correct, then a lot of good science is also characterized
by an unwillingness to give up central claims, even in the face of
conflicting evidence. In his view, science wouldn't get anywhere if we
were always obsessively attempting to test our theories; for much of the
time, we need to simply assume the correctness of these theories and
make use of them. If there's a difference here, it may be a matter of
degree. (And it is also important to distinguish (a) scientific claims
from (b) scientific practice from (c) the personal attributes of
scientists. Individual scientists may have all sorts of unpleasant and
even "unscientific" characteristics which get checked or corrected by the
general practices of science.)

-- and scientists won't? Note that this topic is a repeat of (3) above. Again, see Kuhn on the way "normal science" (as
opposed to revolutionary science) works. And also, the fact that some
creationists irrationally hang onto certain views doesn't show that the
content of those views is unscientific.

Integrity. Creation scientists "use any fallacy
in the logic books" to advance their views.

Again we can make the point that this is a description of the personal
traits of some "creation scientists." It doesn't follow that the content
of creation science is unscientific. (It's strange to think that you can
evaluate a discipline by the behavior of individual participants. I
would think that to judge a discipline we need to evaluate the way it
says participants ought to act, not necessarily how they actually do.) No doubt we could also find plenty of
conventional scientists who are not above using fallacious arguments,
especially in promoting their views to an audience of nonscientists. (It
does seem as though there are a lot of particularly egregious examples in
the case of creation science, though.)